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Friday, January 29, 2016

Drive-ing me Crazy

Normally my posts are about all the wonderful ways Google tools can be used to transform teaching and learning. Unfortunately this post is not one of those.

Many people have been emailing me saying that they are not able to access my publicly shared help guides, slideshows, and other Google resources. It turns out something has gone terribly wrong with my Google Drive.

If you are unable to access my resources as well, I wanted to take a moment here to try to explain what is happening…

In short, my Google Drive and all the files in it become inaccessible to me and everyone else for hours at a time most every day. No one can open any of my publicly shared Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, folders, and such.

The first record I have of this problem is all the way back in March of 2014 when it first happened and I contacted Google tech support for help. Since then the problem has gotten progressively worse. It used to happen once every few months, then every few weeks, and now it is a daily occurrence.

In addition, the length of the outages is increasing. It used to be just a few hours, but yesterday by Drive was inaccessible for 15 hours starting at 8:00 AM (EST). It then came back over night, and then promptly at 8 AM this morning Drive stopped working again.

The problem is not user specific or device specific. When my Drive becomes inaccessible no one anywhere on any device can access any of my files.

When the problem happens, here is what people see…

If you try to open one of my publicly shared Google Documents you will see:

If you try to open one of my publicly shared Google Slideshows you will see:

If you try to open one of my publicly shared Google Drive folders you will see:

If I try to open my own Google Drive, I see:

As a Google Certified Trainer and Google Certified Innovator I have created literally hundreds of help guides, slide shows, and other training resources. I release everything under a Creative Commons licenses so anyone can use and re-use my resources however they need. This Drive problem has moved from a minor inconvenience to a major problem as no one can access any of my resources for the majority of any day, and I cannot use my own resources for the many trainings I do for schools across Ohio and surrounding states.

So, if you try to access my resources and are unable to, the best suggestion I can give is for you to try again later. The files will eventually open up, but it may take several hours before they are accessible. I truly apologize for this problem, and hope someone at Google can help me diagnose and correct the issue once and for all.

Good post ... maybe include http://www.google.com/appsstatus and http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/drive.google.com.html as resources people can use to check before contacting Helpdesk or their Google nerd.

I attempted to embed a Google Slides pres into a Google Site page and it will not open my file or display it on the page! Have been getting the "Sorry, unable to open file at this time" error. Very strange!

Me too. I absolutely love everything about the Google ecosystem and use Drive for everything I do professionally and personally. A few hiccups are to be expected, but my Drive has gone down day after day for several months now, for up to 15 hours at a time. I can't help but think this also looks bad for Google when I am trying to do GAFE trainings for schools and the tools will not work.

Just a thought - not that I'm hoping that it happens again, but if/when it does, it may be isolated to the individual node you (or your ISP) has cached as the nearest node.

We had similar issues with our Student Information System - one node down, the rest were up, and they didn't have a proper redirect failover setup (something I would imagine Google has down pat, but if your ISP is caching, could negate Google's efforts).

What we've had to do with our SIS situation is to clear the local DNS cache on our domain server. Then you have to clear the cache of your Device (C:\> ipconfig /flushdns on Windows, chrome://net-internals > DNS > Clear Host cache on Chromebook, on a Mac - depends on your version, see https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202516)

I'm not saying this is a solution, but a possible one. If the ISP is caching (and not updating their cache regularly) you may need to connect to an external system (like your phone's hotspot) then flush the cache to see if you can connect to a different Drive host.

Stephen, thanks for your suggestions. I really appreciate it. Unfortunately the problem seems to be unrelated to geographical location. I have seen it happen when I am doing trainings in Columbus, Ohio and Cleveland, Ohio and even Pennsylvania. I have also gotten emails from people in other states saying they could not access my files. I also jump on my phone when the problem happens to double-check and still cannot access my files through my 3G connection.

Thanks for your comment, but I am not using a proxy server. In addition, the problem is not limited to me. When my Drive becomes inaccessible, nobody anywhere in the world on any device can open any of my publicly shared files.

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